Dairy farmers producing under 1m litres of milk have until 31 May to submit applications for a one-off payment funded by part of NI’s £4.1m allocation of EU Exceptional Adjustment Aid (EAA).

To be eligible for payment, dairy farmers must have produced 1m litres or less between 1 April 2015 and 31 March 2016 and have to still be in milk production.

The £4.1m fund was originally to be spent on compensation for removal of BVD persistently infected calves, a pig industry competitiveness scheme, a free soil-sampling service and training in farm business planning.

Low BVD claim uptake

However, a low uptake of BVD claims and delays in opening the other measures means that around £1.5m of the EAA fund is expected to be unspent by the European Commission’s deadline of 30 September 2017.

“We have added a further component to the package to help use up any remaining funds,” a DAERA spokesperson said on Friday.

Eligible dairy farmers will be paid on a per-litre basis up to a cap of 500,000 litres. However, the rate of payment will not be known until all applications for the scheme have been received and the exact amount of leftover EAA fund is calculated.

Assuming that around 75% of the 3,537 dairy farms in NI in 2015 produce under 1m litres, the average eligible applicant, paid to the 500,000-litre cap, could expect a payment of around £800 from the fund.

Consulting industry

The Ulster Farmers’ Union has taken issue with DAERA for not consulting industry on how the leftover EAA fund should spent.

“Beef and sheep farmers will inevitably question the decision to direct this funding to smaller dairy farmers,” UFU president Barclay Bell said.

However, the new measure is an extension of the Small Dairy Farmers Scheme in England, and a DAERA spokesperson said that the department was restricted to using the UK measures notified to the European Commission last November.

Application forms for the Small Dairy Farmers Scheme are available on the Rural Payments Agency (RPA) website.

Farmers are required to enter the total milk produced between April 2015 and March 2016 as well as statements from processors as evidence of deliveries in both the reference period and in April 2017.

Completed applications and evidence must then be emailed or posted to the RPA office in Newcastle upon Tyne by the end of the month.

Pig competitiveness scheme opens

The pig industry competitiveness scheme opened this week and proposes to cover 100% of wormer medication costs in pig herds.

The scheme is an original measure announced under the EEA package last November and applications forms from the DAERA website must be returned to the department by 31 May.

To be eligible, a representative of the farm business must attend a relevant workshop under the Farm Family Key Skills programme and a private vet must confirm that endoparasites are present, or have been present, in the herd in the last six months.

EEA measures

DAERA has also pointed out that the BVD compensation scheme is still open and that the free-soil sampling service is still being developed.

The final EAA measure of business training has been dropped, due to difficulties in appointing an external provider within the EU timeframe.

Funds are instead being allocated to existing Farm Family Key Skills programme.